By Rich Lowry
Thursday, October 24, 2019
In the late 1970s, a little-known left-wing professor and
activist decided to embark on a three-year-long project to balance the alleged
patriotic bias in American historical writing.
His name was Howard Zinn, and his project became the book
A People’s History of the United States, a desecration of American
memory that is the single most destructive act in the annals of American
historiography.
Not much was expected of the fiftysomething historian,
whose prior books were out of print and whose work had largely consisted of
attending protests. His agent sought a $20,000 advance, but Harper & Row
coughed up only $10,000. The publisher initially printed just 5,000 copies. At
first sales didn’t amount to much, although the book got a nomination for an
American Book Award.
It gained renown from pop culture, and positive
references in the movie Good Will Hunting and the HBO show The Sopranos.
Its sales increased year over year, until it had sold more than 2 million
copies and been translated into at least 20 languages.
The work is built on a tendentious or partial account of
events, not to mention outright falsehoods. In his review, Harvard University
professor Oscar Handlin noted that “Zinn is a stranger to evidence bearing upon
the peoples about whom he purports to write” and slammed “the deranged quality
of his fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter
how intractable the evidence of American history.”
Evidence be damned. Zinn’s work is a go-to book on
college campuses — for nearly everything. It shows up in courses not only in
history but in political science, economics, literature, and — of course —
women’s studies.
When Zinn died, the Guardian called him a great
man and the Russian TV network RT gushed that he had “limitless depth.” The
novelist Dave Eggers wrote in The New Yorker that he “was the embodiment
of the term ‘living legend,’ and his effect on how we see and teach history is
immeasurable.” True enough, to his and our shame.
***
Poets, novelists, lexicographers, and historians have,
over the centuries, been central to excavating and delineating the identities
of nations, toward the goal of establishing proud, self-governing peoples. In
the United States, this class has turned its back on a nation-buttressing role
and instead embraced a hostility to the American nation as such, to its
cultural supports, its traditions, and its history.
The clerisy has often been abetted in this project by
leaders of the country, including government mandarins who were robustly
nationalist until the latter half of the 20th century. “Then in the 1960s and
1970s,” the late social scientist Samuel Huntington wrote, “they began to
promote measures consciously designed to weaken America’s cultural and creedal
identity and to strengthen racial, ethnic, cultural, and other subnational
identities. These efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they
governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.”
We live in their ongoing anti-national experiment.
***
Just as nationalism, or at least loyalty to the
nation-state, is very old, so is the impulse to move beyond mere local or
national attachments. The word “cosmopolitan” has its root in the Greek word
“kosmopolites,” or citizen of the cosmos or world.
The fourth-century b.c. Cynic philosopher Diogenes lived
in Athens after his exile from his native Sinope and rejected all convention in
favor of a life of virtue, making a barrel into his home in the Athenian
marketplace. He is the first recorded person to use what has now become a
cosmopolitan cliché: It is reported that “when he was asked where he came from,
he replied, ‘I am a citizen of the world.’” This was a radical, even senseless,
statement, since the Greeks considered citizenship possible only through the polis,
or city.
The Stoics took the cosmopolitan baton from the Cynics.
We exist in a local community by an “accident of birth,” according to the
first-century Roman philosopher Seneca, but the world beyond is “truly great
and truly common.” We should “measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun.”
This tradition was recovered during the Enlightenment. In
his 1753 work Le Cosmopolite, the widely traveled Louis-Charles Fougeret
de Montbron maintained that “all the countries are the same to me” and boasted
that he changed “my places of residence according to my whim.”
Cosmopolitanism came in different flavors, some more
robust than others. It could refer merely to someone who traveled frequently
and had a keen interest in the world. Or it could denote a desire for a world
state. The 18th-century Prussian nobleman Anacharsis Cloots wanted to eliminate
nations and establish a “republic of united individuals,” based on the
principle of one sovereign for all people. He was fired by enthusiasm for the
French Revolution, which he considered a step toward that glorious outcome. He
led a delegation of foreigners to the French National Constituent Assembly to
declare the world’s fealty to the Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of
Man. The self-styled citoyen de l’humanité, or citizen of mankind, was
eventually guillotined by his fellow revolutionaries when they falsely accused
him of being part of, yes, a foreign plot.
What’s behind all cosmopolitanism is what the British
writer Paul Gilroy has called “the principled and methodical cultivation of a
degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history.” As a result,
cosmopolitanism has always been open to the charge that — whatever its
broad-mindedness or idealism — it cultivates a contempt for what’s near,
immediate, and tangible, in favor of what’s far away.
Charles Dickens skewered the character Mrs. Jellyby in
his novel Bleak House for being so consumed with a humanitarian project
in Africa that she neglected all around her, including her own children. She
“had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off,” as if she “could see
nothing nearer than Africa!”
Getting at the same point, Rousseau commented that
cosmopolitans “boast that they love everyone, to have the right to love no
one.”
This is all the more important in the contemporary
context. It used to be that cosmopolitanism was largely the attitude of
philosophers and critics of society — outsiders. Diogenes, while he was eating
and masturbating in public to outrage the bourgeoisie, never imagined governing
Athens. Now a broadly cosmopolitan sensibility infuses our elite in government,
academia, and business.
***
An American version of cosmopolitanism began to go off
the rails in the early 20th century. In a 1915 essay in The Nation, the
scholar Horace Kallen attacked standard notions of assimilation as a plot by
the Anglo-Saxons for continued dominance. “The ‘American race’ is a totally
unknown thing,” he wrote, arguing instead for “a democracy of nationalities.”
The common tongue of this democracy is still English, “but each nationality
expresses its emotional and voluntary life in its own language.” The country
merely serves as a platform for multiple nations living within its borders: “as
the foundation and background for the realization of the distinctive
individuality of each natio that composes it.”
Randolph Bourne picked up the theme in The Atlantic
in a 1916 essay titled “Trans-national America.” He saw immigration as an
opportunity to create “the first international nation,” a “cosmopolitan
federation of national colonies.”
Radical at the time, this point of view steadily
insinuated itself into the mainstream. Horace Kallen took a bow in 1972 as a
90-year-old, with multiculturalism on the rise. “It takes about 50 years for an
idea to break through and become vogue,” he stated. “No one likes an intruder,
particularly when he is upsetting the commonplace.”
***
Fueled by the rise of ethnic-pride movements in the 1960s
and critiques of America as fundamentally racist and corrupt, the intellectual
tide of multiculturalism swelled in the 1990s. In a typical expression of the
worldview, the academic Amy Gutmann, who eventually became president of the
University of Pennsylvania, wrote in favor of “public recognition and
preservation” of “discrete ethnic, linguistic, and other cultural groups.” She
insisted that our schools “must move beyond the morally misguided and
politically dangerous idea of asking us to choose between being, above all,
citizens of our own society or, above all, citizens of the world. We are, above
all, none of the above.”
It became in vogue — as John Fonte explains in his book Sovereignty
or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? — for
curricula and standards to refer to the American “peoples.”
The liberal political philosopher Richard Rorty argued in
the mid 1990s that there was much to admire in the academic Left’s focus on
underrepresented groups. “But there is a problem,” he wrote, “with this left:
it is unpatriotic. In the name of ‘the politics of difference,’ it refuses to
rejoice in the country it inhabits. It repudiates the idea of a national
identity, and the emotion of national pride.”
Relatedly, the end of the Cold War engendered a newly
potent transnationalism, contemptuous of national boundaries and supportive of
institutions of global governance. In this view, old loyalties were not just
anachronistic but morally unsupportable. The social critic Richard Sennett
wrote of “the evil of a shared national identity.” Professor of law and ethics
Martha Nussbaum warned of the “morally dangerous” dictates of “patriotic
pride,” commending instead a commitment to the “worldwide community of human
beings.”
It’s not just the intellectuals. American elites are
enmeshed in the world of globalization — the enhanced travel and contacts, the
multinational corporations, the NGOs. This inclines them to the view that the
world is and should be ever more interconnected, and they are often fired by a
near-messianic certitude that this trend is associated with the spread of all
that is true and good. As Huntington points out, in the 19th century the
growing sophistication and continental scale of American business promoted the
nationalism of American elites over and against localism; now they promote the
transnationalism of American elites over and against nationalism.
Globalization is real and the market a powerful force,
but utopianism about trade and technology — supposedly driving us toward a
borderless world and inevitable progress — has proven as facile and wrong as
any other utopianism.
No, trade with China didn’t radically transform its
regime. The general secretary of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping, has
effectively made himself president for life, centralizing power and writing
authoritarian “Xi Jinping thought” into the constitution.
No, social media haven’t promoted liberalization. Once
upon a time, leaders in tech boasted that, in the words of Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, the Internet is a “force for peace” in the world. That
was before it became clear that tech was a powerful tool in the arsenal of
Russia and China, that Facebook had played a role in ethnic cleansing in
Myanmar, and that white nationalists and other extremists use social-media
platforms as a tool of radicalization.
And no, the nation isn’t fading away, contrary to what
has been constantly predicted by observers who wish it were.
***
The people who write down and teach our country’s story
share these anti-national attitudes. They have reversed the traditional role of
historiography. For the longest time, the bounds of historical writing were set
by the nation, which was the natural subject of historians. The modern nation-state
and professional historiography grew up together.
In America, as the New York University historian Thomas
Bender remarks, the very first histories focused on localities and states. The
first national work, The History of the American Revolution, didn’t
appear until 1789, the year the Constitution went into effect. Americans still
struck most observers as not very historically minded.
John Adams plaintively asked a correspondent in 1813,
“Can you account for the Apathy, the Antipathy of this Nation to their own
History? Is there not a repugnance to the thought of looking back? While
thousands of frivolous Novels are read with eagerness and got by heart, the
History of our own native Country is not only neglected, but despized and
abhorred?”
In a couple of decades, a more rigorous effort to
document the country’s founding and history would get underway. Key debates and
documents were published, including in a series of books called “American
Archives.” It proudly announced, “The undertaking in which we have embarked is,
emphatically, a National one: National in its scope and object, its end and
aim.”
And then there was George Bancroft. A prodigious scholar
and politically active Democratic statesman, he wrote the magisterial History
of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent,
published beginning in 1844.
The work stretched across ten volumes, written over the
course of four decades, and eventually covered the years 1492 to 1789. Bancroft
started his research by devoting a page of a blank book to each day of a year,
and then, from his extensive reading, filled the page with every possible event
that occurred on that date. His volumes became best sellers and earned him a
fortune.
The scholar of nationalism Hans Kohn situated him within
the great tradition of nationalist historians: “Bancroft, who occupies the same
place in the development of American historiography and of the American
national consciousness as Palacký does among the Czechs, Michelet among the
French, Munch among the Norwegians, and Treitschke among the Germans, was a
national historian not only because he saw national history in as favorable a
light as possible but because he tried to formulate and document some of the
most prominent traits of American national self-identification. He helped
delineate the image that Americans formed of themselves.”
Bancroft was unembarrassingly, unabashedly pro-American.
He had a providential view of America that infused his History, and he
believed in the essential beneficence of the American project.
His work may not meet contemporary professional
standards, but America’s historians have eschewed his approach and point of
view entirely. They have turned their backs on the nation as a subject and, to
the extent they take account of it, portray it as a vehicle of rapacity and
misrule, as Howard Zinn did.
“If love of the nation is what drove American historians
to the study of the past in the nineteenth century,” the Harvard historian Jill
Lepore writes, “hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it
in the second half of the twentieth century.” The discipline became obsessed
with micro-topics dictated by identity politics, dismissive of the lay reader,
and, of course, hostile to the nation as such.
***
Our schools have run the same course. In the nationalist
period after the Civil War, the teaching of American history flourished after a
sustained push to emphasize it in curricula. Before the war, only a handful of
states required history instruction; by the turn of the century, a majority of
states did. And it was explicitly patriotic.
According to the historian Merle Curti, the schools
“emphasized the importance of presenting vividly and attractively to children
the glorious deeds of American heroes, the sacrifices and bravery of our
soldiers and sailors in wartime, the personalities of presidents, who might
properly be regarded as symbols of the nation in the manner in which royal
personages of Europe were regarded. By the 1890s, state after state was
requiring by law that subjects deemed peculiarly fitted to inculcating
patriotism, such as American history and civics, be taught on every educational
level below the college.”
As the long nationalist era after the Civil War faded, so
did the emphasis on patriotism in instruction. Patriotic themes disappeared
from school readers steadily throughout the 20th century, and history itself
has begun to vanish from our education system.
Less than a fifth of colleges and universities require
their students to take an American-history or -government course. Of the top
colleges and universities in the country, only a fraction require even history
majors to take a course in American history, although they often have
geographic distribution requirements (which helpfully exclude the United
States). Gender, racial, class, and environmental history have captured the
heart of the academy.
Worse, of course, there has been a deliberate effort to
trash America’s statesmen and heroes as exemplars of racism, sexism, and
classism.
In 2014, a firestorm erupted over the College Board’s new
curriculum for Advanced Placement United States History. It didn’t mention
James Madison or Martin Luther King Jr. but did manage to name-check Chief
Little Turtle and Mercy Otis Warren. It had a hostile view of the American
experience, noting, for instance, that the British legacy here was “a rigid
racial hierarchy” and minimizing the importance of the American Revolution.
A group of more than a hundred scholars wrote a letter
complaining that the new framework imposed “an arid, fragmentary, and
misleading account of American history,” in addition to downplaying “American
citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and
transnational perspective.” In sum, they wrote, the curriculum was “so
inattentive to the sources of national unity and cohesion, that it is hard to
see how students will gain any coherent idea of what those sources might be.”
After denouncing its critics as chauvinistic hacks, the
College Board reversed course and modified the curriculum. But the spirit that
animated the effort in the first place is dominant in U.S. education and eating
away at the foundations of our national project.
***
Memory is what gives a nation its self-image and its
sense of unity and coherence. It plays the same role in a country as it does in
an individual, providing, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “the cement, the
bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties are embedded.”
The great historian William H. McNeill puts it well: “A
people without a full quiver of relevant agreed-upon statements, accepted in
advance through education or less formalized acculturation, soon finds itself
in deep trouble, for, in the absence of believable myths, coherent public
action becomes very difficult to improvise or sustain.”
McNeill cites the example of the British in World War II,
who were fortified by what they had learned from their schoolbooks, namely that
they had lost the initial battles in European conflicts but always prevailed in
the end.
Arthur Schlesinger explains, “As the means of defining
national identity, history becomes a means of shaping history.”
What historic challenges do the race, gender, and class
obsessions of American historiographers prepare us for today? To win a campaign
against heteronormativity? To beat ourselves up endlessly and dethrone
historical figure after historical figure over white privilege? To be
constantly watchful for the baleful effects of toxic masculinity?
An anti-national history is, on top of everything,
profoundly ungrateful. It fails to credit our ancestors for achievements on an
epic scale. It denies the continuities of our history and our dependence on men
and women who didn’t know us but bequeathed us the marvel of America. It runs
counter to the inscription that John Adams wrote on the tombstone of his
forebear Henry Adams: “This stone and several others have been placed in this
yard, by a great great grandson from a veneration of the piety, humility,
simplicity, prudence, patience, temperance, frugality, industry and
perseverance of his Ancestors, in hopes of recommending an imitation of their
virtues to their Posterity.”
We have traveled a long way down from that sentiment,
which is impossible to improve on more than two centuries later. If centuries
of adventure, drama, striving, and achievement aren’t to be wiped away in a
“great forgetting,” the country needs an Americanizing campaign of civic and
history education, suffused with a belief in the country’s uniqueness and
greatness and buttressed by its wayward elites.
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